[HN Gopher] Building a website like it's 1999
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Building a website like it's 1999
Author : boffbowsh
Score : 238 points
Date : 2022-12-24 04:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (localghost.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (localghost.dev)
| [deleted]
| s-xyz wrote:
| Maybe I missed it, but the css classes and styles in the
| examples, this was already available in 1999?
| sudo_navendu wrote:
| As long as it does what it intends to do, plain old HTML would
| suffice.
| cutler wrote:
| You left out the Java applet or maybe a Perl script in /cgi-bin.
| gauddasa wrote:
| The 5KB to 10KB pages of that era appear more complex than
| minimalist 1MB pages of today. You could save 100 or even 200
| webpages on a 1.4MB floppy disk.
| thanksgiving wrote:
| Side rant: I have probably looked up more about this CLS
| (cumulative layout shift) thing that now I hate the word "just".
| "Just" do this, "just" do that. Bollocks. Tomorrow it will be
| something else. There are already at least three ways to handle
| image width and height. It is easy they say. Use the first
| approach if the image is an important of the main subject of the
| page. Use the second approach if the image is purely decorative
| and not an integral to the main subject of the page. Use the
| third approach if you are an idiot (I made this part up because I
| forgot what the third one was for).
|
| I see this website does not have width and height in all of its
| images. For example, in the image below, the author clearly knows
| the dimensions of the image are 1000px x 743px. However, they
| didn't include the dimensions and the CLS is green under 0.1
| (0.087 mobile and 0.045 desktop in my test [pagespeed]).
|
| I opened developer tools in my firefox nightly browser, set
| throttling to GPRS, and disabled cache in my network tab and I
| reloaded the page.
|
| I clearly see text push down as screenshots appear. So do width
| and height / aspect ratio not matter any more (did they ever)? I
| absolutely hate feeling like an idiot because I can't keep up
| with what matters and what does not.
|
| <pre> <figure> <picture> <source
| srcset="/img/blog/build-1999/geocities1.webp" type="image/webp">
| <img src="/img/blog/build-1999/geocities1.png" alt="A brightly
| coloured website that says 'Welcome to Tom & Sherry's Proud
| Grandparents page. The Proud Grandparents page was created to
| show pictures of our grandchildren to family and friends, and an
| occasional Web surfer. The grandkids, our pride and joy, and
| their parents have made us very proud. Okay, let's see the
| pictures!'"> </picture> <figcaption><a href="https://geocities.re
| storativland.org/Heartland/Ridge/1217/">... Proud Grandparents
| Page</a> </figcaption></figure> </pre>
|
| [pagespeed]
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Flocalghos...
| masswerk wrote:
| A common problem seems to be connected to setting a CSS
| dimension to "auto", as for responsive layouts. This seems to
| do the job, though: <img src="whatever.jpg"
| width="400" height="300" style="width: 400px; max-width: 100%;
| height: auto; aspect-ratio: 4/3;" alt="yet another image" />
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Moreover it's a site of images. It's not meant to be accessible
| to anyone who can't browse images.
| indus wrote:
| No visitor counter?
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Marquee and blink are fun. Any site that removes them for the
| sake of accessibility is killing the whole idea of nostalgia and
| a 90s vibe.
|
| Go out in the world. There is marquee and blinking text
| everywhere, on billboards, ads, and marquees. Put real life
| things on the web isn't a crime.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Meh, I don't miss marquee. They were always too slow for me, I
| just wanted to read the content.
| onion2k wrote:
| The crime is using blink and marquee in the real world.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| Most news programs I've seen have a marquee with the latest
| headlines running across the bottom.
|
| Great feature for muted tv waiting rooms, for example.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Apart from the style & aesthetic, there was this great & glorious
| period of time on the web from around 1997 to 2004 (rough
| estimate) where broadband was was still rare enough the web
| designers had to assume slow dialup connections and at least try
| to keep page size low.
|
| During this time, if you had broadband and a moderately fast
| computer, browsing the web lightning fast.
|
| Then came the frameworks and, especially after smartphones, the
| adaptive web for small mobile-first(ish, or second or whatever)
| screen sizes and the bloat began. Previously you only had to
| worry about pages that dumped flash ads or used flash for every
| UI element, they were still slow. Then everything became about as
| slow as before.
|
| I still think browsing is a bit faster than the dialup days, but
| not as fast as the golden age from '97-'04. It seems now that
| page loads sizes & javascript CPU load expand at roughly the pave
| of computing power & bandwidth availability.
|
| Which means it's a pretty awful experience for anyone on a low
| end computer w/ broadband that barely meets the definition.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| I bet you some people got really annoyed when written language
| was standardized and people couldn't simply spell things willy
| nilly using "their creativity". Every time you read a book you
| are looking at thousands of years of typographical
| standardization, but you don't lament the fact that they "all
| look the same". In fact, if you took a book out of the library
| shelf and saw it was written in a weird font (i.e. papyrus) and
| with weird formatting, unless it was poetry you would put it
| right back and never touch it again. Same happens when you read a
| scientific paper and you see it's clearly written with MS Word.
|
| This fetishization of the "old web" initially works when you're
| just browsing some terse blog or personal web page from people
| you don't even know, but the moment you want to actually search
| for information on the web this style of websites immediately
| becomes annoying. There's a reason why Wikipedia has kept
| basically the same layout since forever, because it works. If I
| want to know about medieval history I can navigate Wikipedia in a
| matter of seconds. On the other hand, good luck navigating
| through the same information from the personal blog of some
| retired medieval professor. And what if you want to switch topic
| and read stuff from another blog with a completely different
| layout? God help you.
| pjerem wrote:
| I think you and the author both misunderstood what we really
| lost.
|
| I don't think that what we miss the most is the old 90's
| patchwork of gif style. Not that I'm not nostalgic of it, of
| course I am.
|
| But what I miss is the fact that back in the day, owning a
| little part of the internet was the normal thing and, contrary
| to nowadays profiles on social media, this space was really
| yours. It was as awful as what people's tastes and minds are
| but it had, well, personality. And you really owned it. It was
| awful because you were awful but that was ok because everybody
| is awful. If it was nice, that was because you took the time to
| make it nice.
|
| It's not the style I miss, but the fact that it was the result
| of a real person's hobby.
| giantrobot wrote:
| This is the most salient point. The lost feature of the 90s
| web is the _content_ , not the GeoCities aesthetic.
|
| Web pages were quirky not because of gifs but because someone
| lovingly collected a bunch of Dragonball Z images or wrote
| summaries of X-Files episodes and put those up for others to
| enjoy. Some people put up recipes or stories or whatever.
| Most amateur homepages weren't a monetized side hustle, just
| content about the creators' interests.
|
| Unfortunately today a lot of passion content lives in social
| media silos. Some still survives on the web, though now on
| Wikis rather than homepages.
|
| I don't miss the GeoCities aesthetic of the 90s web, I
| suffered through the design to get to the interesting
| content. The design wasn't the important part.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| I truly don't understand this argument.
|
| First of all, people post extremely niche and personal
| content on their social media feeds. Heck, my own Twitter,
| Tumblr and Instagram feeds are mostly comprised of stuff on
| the same level of quirky ingenuity of the early web. So if
| your issue is with the presence of this type of "content",
| then I really don't see it.
|
| Secondly you might argue, like many others, that the _true_
| problem is not that the content is here, but it 's not the
| _norm_. It 's not the norm to have a website, it's not the
| norm to be fragile and personal and quirky online. But even
| if that were the case, why do you care? There is more
| "90s-style" content today that there were in the 90s. You
| don't have enough time to live on this earth to read it
| all. Do you care if "in proportion" they don't make up the
| same share of the total webpages like they once did?
| Doesn't the sheer number of them not satisfy you enough?
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| For a long time letters were only written by hand. Nowadays
| the only people writing them by hand are the people who truly
| want it.
|
| In the early days you really had no choice. There was no
| WordPress, no MySpace and no Github Pages. It was the norm
| because it was the easiest thing to do if you wanted a
| presence on the web. If something like Facebook existed in
| 1993 let me assure you a whole lot of people would have been
| contempt with just creating a profile there and calling it
| quits.
|
| There are more personal websites today than there ever were,
| people who want to be creative on the web always find a way.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I've found some of the most informative websites look like they
| were made in the late 90's
| blown_gasket wrote:
| Language standardization, typography, and published vs
| unpublished works are all in separate domains.
|
| Language standardization is not typography and we have figured
| out typography for the most part before language
| standardization. Look at the American English 'argument' vs the
| British English 'arguement' or 'color' vs 'colour'.
|
| I also just so happen to have a collection of German children's
| books - the font family each uses is different, but it's still
| German.
|
| I liken web sites to digital magazines and newspapers. These
| have an artistic quality to them in terms of content,
| structure, pictures, etc.
|
| Would you not think it bland if every newspaper or magazine on
| the planet used the same structure, font-face, and voice?
| masswerk wrote:
| Mind that this was the amateur section of the web. By 1999,
| professional websites had become pretty complex (often more
| complex than they are at average nowadays) and invested
| considerably in navigation. (There was still some
| experimentation going on, as building a website was also a
| question of ambitions, which included improving on what was
| considered a common or average standard. Website navigation was
| the most obvious one and was also a creative challenge with
| prominent awards having dedicated categories for this. No way
| you could have gotten away with a "hamburger" in 1999. ;-) )
|
| As for the modern web and amateur content, does a post in some
| infinite-scroll content compilation really compare that
| favorably?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'd argue the inconsistency in design is not limited to old
| websites. If anything, it's far worse with modern websites,
| since they aggressively re-style interface elements and
| frequently invent their own paradigms. Scrolling may re-arrange
| the content of a document, sometimes a desktop website has
| mobile paradigms like hamburger button causing a laggy menu to
| appear, often with buttons with no label that are decorated
| with minimalist line-art icons that are about as easy to parse
| as Linear B. Links are replaced with buttons, which are never
| natively styled and rarely clear that they _are_ buttons. You
| have to click and find out. Sometimes clicking in a blank area
| causes something unpredictable to happen. Scrolling up or
| moving the mouse cursor to the edge of the window may cause pop
| over-elements to cover the text. The design is constantly
| shifting and moving around as ads are loaded randomly within
| whatever you 're reading. Resizing the window may cause UI
| elements to move around, or to appear, or be hidden. Clicking a
| link may cause the ephemeral state of the document to change.
| The back button doesn't work after this happens. Sometimes
| scrolling down breaks the back button as well.
| n1c00o wrote:
| > This fetishization of the "old web" initially works when
| you're just browsing some terse blog or personal web page from
| people you don't even know, but the moment you want to actually
| search for information on the web this style of websites
| immediately becomes annoying.
|
| This. I see a lot of people being angry at UI changes on bug
| platforms with the reason that "they all look the same", but
| unless the platform is a blog or a personal site, having some
| standardised look helps reading and avoid being distracted. I
| totally agree with you.
| [deleted]
| n1c00o wrote:
| s/bug/some
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >There's a reason why Wikipedia has kept basically the same
| layout since forever, because it works.
|
| I wish other designers and developers internalised this. The
| constant treadmill of redesigns common with seemingly all
| modern software development undervalues the users' mental model
| and muscle memory for how the site works.
|
| I guess it would be shit for job security though.
| Hasnep wrote:
| One factor that makes me prefer that retired professor's
| website is that it works perfectly with reader mode, which a JS
| heavy website isn't guaranteed to.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| The point of people who fetishize the old web is about the
| quirkiness of the websites. If you just slap a reader mode on
| them all the aesthetics vanishs and only the html shines,
| which is a whole other topic
| rambambram wrote:
| I really like how I can switch styles in the top right corner.
|
| I'm not necessarily nostalgic for the design from the '90's web,
| but the openness and sometimes weirdness of personal sites/blogs
| is something that I miss (and can really appreciate if I do find
| it).
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I'm nostalgic for not needing an 80Mbps symmetric 4G connection
| to browse basic web pages, with ADSL no longer even viable for
| most sites.
| butz wrote:
| But you still can use HTML4 and it will work on modern browsers.
| That's the best thing about the web - backward compatibility
| (until google steps in and does something silly). Use time
| appropriate image formats, like gif and jpeg, probably even bmp,
| and re-do navigation with iframes.
| asimpletune wrote:
| I remember learning how to write html w my friend when we were in
| middle school. The hardest part was content. We decided just on
| lists of things we liked and didn't like. I remember adding
| things to these lists was super fun and we put a lot of thought
| into what was there and why.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Late 90's, I was using a website framework in a no-sql object
| database, with an outliner for coding.
|
| There was a three pass rendering system, and I was writing with
| CSS, but in the final filter I was string replacing font-face in
| in place of the classes because or poor support in browsers.
| [deleted]
| 3836293648 wrote:
| Ah, back before the internet had soul. Ut's definitely terrible
| design, but it's preferrable over the soulless modern minimalist
| web
| harryvederci wrote:
| Back _when_ the internet had soul.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| me write good
| nonesuchluck wrote:
| This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web.
| Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially
| outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and
| rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we
| were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they
| came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web
| professional could use these tricks today to simulate that
| appearance.
|
| The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators
| were integral to the experience, because they brought in the
| weirdos who didn't know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but
| lost something along the way.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| I think the comparison to outside art is very apt, although I
| think the boundary between professional and amateur was porous.
| Professionals wrote the tools amateurs used, they wrote the
| books and references at least some of those amateurs consulted,
| and I imagine they originally wrote at least some of the
| snippets that got copy and pasted endlessly. In theory, a
| return of the old web (aesthetically and socially) could
| involve people copying snippets like these. As you mention, the
| current web's complexity makes that unlikely, unfortunately.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > FrontPage
|
|
| Soulsbane wrote:
| LOL, also spacer.gif(Not so much FrontPage but it reminded me
| of the times).
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Having cut my teeth on FrontPage, I remember being
| unreasonably happy with the markup generated by DreamWeaver.
| alberth wrote:
| No-code.
|
| What's old is new again.
| rafale wrote:
| WYSIWYG
| Shared404 wrote:
| Confluence does the same thing now.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| Now I have to do stuff like this manually. Seems like things
| are regressing.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| we love to see it
| jonathanoliver wrote:
| I only had Notepad (the default Windows text editor). I
| longed for Microsoft Frontpage and HoTMetaL and Dreamweaver.
| Looking back, I'm glad gained experience on the native
| experience rather than through the editor abstractions
| because it forced me to learn.
| rafale wrote:
| I longed for Flash but I learned DHTML instead. I bet many
| young readers haven't heard of that "technology".
| [deleted]
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I used coolpage :D
| http://web.archive.org/web/20010517033954/http://www.klimane...
| mysterydip wrote:
| HotDog Professional, anyone? https://archive.org/details/tuco
| ws_194462_HotDog_Professiona...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The beautiful result of copying and pasting html from your
| favourite sites. No CSS so the styles came along.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| HoTMetaL!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HoTMetaL
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| la64710 wrote:
| Frankly speaking I do not understand why a blog like yours is
| getting so many hits , whereas surely something like this written
| by me or 99 percent of the users in HN can never get such
| traction. I understand the reason for this is that you are
| somebody whereas we are nobodies. That's why I don't think that
| outside this niche of people who appreciate this idea it wound
| really take off. We are not going to wake up tomorrow to see the
| internet filled with 90s style websites. Those days are gone my
| friend.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > whereas surely something like this written by me or 99
| percent of the users in HN can never get such traction
|
| Do you not think the author is one of the "99 percent of users"
| of HN?
| [deleted]
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Dunno. HN is actually a powerful "viral engine." Lots of people
| without an internet following (including me) have had stuff
| blow up unexpectedly, and it's not world-class research or
| anything.
| pavlov wrote:
| A few weeks ago I realized that my personal website from 1999 is
| still up and unchanged, just copied from one host to another:
|
| https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/
|
| I made this when I was 19, before I changed career ambitions to
| programming. Maybe it's moderately interesting as an actual 1999
| website time capsule.
|
| There's no CSS because IIRC it didn't work very well in Netscape
| 4. Layout was done with tables and frames. The front page looks
| oddly tiny now, but I guess it was the correct size on a 1024*768
| screen. I remember being happy about coming up with a frame trick
| for vertically centering that menu box. (A classic web design
| conundrum!)
| moffkalast wrote:
| You know it's funny, those demo scene photos would probably be
| thought of as AI generated these days. Maybe it's the
| 'dreaminess'?
|
| Dare post them on Artstation? xd
| pavlov wrote:
| I had the same thought earlier this year when I saw what
| Midjourney is capable of. The style that I'd spent many years
| in my youth trying to master was now available at a push of a
| button.
|
| It felt like I had dodged a bullet by switching to
| programming instead of pursuing an art career. That happened
| primarily because I realized fairly quickly that my talent
| was quite limited and there were thousands of better artists
| in this space, everyone competing over the Internet.
| Specializing on a programming niche felt like a better long-
| term plan.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| really love both the site and the work on the site
| masswerk wrote:
| I like this layout, which is really how I remember the
| late-1990s web:
|
| https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/nurminen1-01.html
|
| A well considered arrangement of structure, content and design.
| Something we do not get to see that much anymore.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's so much harder to pull it off with the huge range in
| screen sizes and resolutions. Back then you could make an
| 800x600 (or maybe even up to 960 width) design and it would
| work on 99% of the monitors (rarely did anyone have more than
| 1024x768).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That's solvable with vw/vx-units in CSS.
|
| I think the range in aspect ratios is the bigger problem.
| It's hard to get around without resulting in a nasty
| reactive design where everything keeps shuffling around as
| you resize the window.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Sure, very solvable nowadays with media queries, flex
| box, grid, screen width and height units, etc. These
| features didn't exist in 90s CSS.
|
| But even though the tools exist today, it is still
| challenging to do well. Agreed that aspect ratio
| variability is a bigger problem (we can no longer count
| on 4:3 as the standard).
| doubled112 wrote:
| I have a 4K monitor on my desk with 100% scaling, and one
| of the things that always gives me a chuckle is
| maximizing a browser window.
|
| Most websites just stop getting wider after a certain
| point, which is fine because you wouldn't want to read a
| line of text that long anyway. It's usually a column in
| the middle maybe 1/3rd of the screen.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The typical thing was a fixed width container table
| wrapped with <CENTER> tags. Then you set textalign on
| that table. Voila your table fit all your content with a
| fixed size/aspect but would float center on the page of
| someone with larger than 800x600 or whatever minimum you
| designed for.
| masswerk wrote:
| While numerous websites settled for a fixed width indeed (I
| think, this was mostly a US school of thinking), responsive
| designs were somewhat doable with table layouts. What you
| couldn't do was a general change of element order etc.
| (However, you could respond in JS using `document.write()`
| on first render.)
|
| E.g. (this was a demo installation for a brandable
| horoscope service, not exactly 1999, but from 2000):
| https://www.masswerk.at/demo/easyphone/
| sshine wrote:
| Incidentally, my homepage in 1999 was "localghost.net".
| CyborgCabbage wrote:
| Always gotta mention hypnospace when a post like this shows up :)
| https://www.hypnospace.net/
| Alpi wrote:
| Ok you got me, I feel nostalgic. What strikes me most is that
| those people from 90th were putting their creativity into
| something only handful of people will ever see, they were
| effectively shouting to void.
|
| I would love to be still able to discover low-ranging websites
| like this. I remember somebody shared some alternative search
| engine?
| nicbou wrote:
| Marginalia. Its creator hangs out on HN.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| o/
| asicsp wrote:
| Check out
|
| * https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
|
| * https://ooh.directory/
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were
| putting their creativity into something only handful of people
| will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void.
|
| Well you had visitor counters and guestbooks. There was
| obviously no expectation to go "viral" and have millions of
| visitors, but it felt social in a different way. More like a
| small cozy neighborhood, less like a train station.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I made a website for my amateur games at the time, with the
| requisite visitor counters and guestbook. I was fortunate
| enough to find an archive somewhere, and saw someone who
| worked at a library had come across my site and left some
| encouraging words. For me, that was the best part of the web
| back then.
| achairapart wrote:
| Also: https://millionshort.com/
| exitb wrote:
| Oh, I feel like it's quite the opposite! As a teenager I
| created a crappy non-English website about a topic that
| interested me, added it to a few local search engines (which
| worked more like directories) and it got tons of traffic,
| engagements with the guest book etc. Today, if you just create
| a website and have it crawled by the search engines, it will
| get no traffic at all.
| andai wrote:
| https://wiby.me - search for old websites (and new websites in
| old style. I think the index is updated manually).
| ksec wrote:
| >For my next trick, I'm drawing inspiration from an OG 90s
| classic: Microsoft WordArt.
|
| Not sure if this is widely known. But Scott Forstall co-created
| [1] WordArt during internship at Microsoft.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/natbro/status/1339600779531833344
| dangoor wrote:
| I think mmm.page[1] gets at a good 2022 model of this. People can
| create very personal websites without learning about HTML and
| those sites can be conveniently viewed on mobile.
|
| [1] https://mmm.page/
| eiiot wrote:
| Some of these are actually really cool!
|
| https://marc.rip/
| kristopolous wrote:
| This is impressively bad. Excellent.
| personjerry wrote:
| > And for a whole generation of internet users, having a website
| was the cool thing to do.
|
| "Cool" - You guys weren't getting bullied like me?
| thelittleone wrote:
| Super cool. Another popular addition was a visitor counter.
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(page generated 2022-12-25 23:01 UTC)